Saturday, November 29, 2014

For most of Scott Walker's career, he has lived in a protective political bubble.

Even though he's been in campaign mode for almost the entire span of his political career (which as been all of his entire adult life - and I do used the term 'adult' very loosely), Walker has seldom hit any bumps. The only real time that he had problems was in 1990 when now US Congresswoman Gwen Moore routed him in a race for the state legislature.

And why should he have had many problems?

He has had a lot of support - to the point of collaboration - from the dark money special interest groups, and from his friends like Reince Priebus.

Just as important as the flood of dark money and collaborated campaigns is the fact that he's had the corporate media in his back pocket. The corporate media, especially in Milwaukee, would seldom accurately report the news, especially if it was bad for Walker. They would gloss over the bad news, minimizing its impact, if they reported it at all. They would also bend the truth to make any good news seem better than it really was.

But now that Walker has the White House in his aim, he is forced to leave this protective political bubble and he's finding that it's a cruel world out there.

First, Walker got a history lesson from a fellow Republican, Ohio Governor John Kasich.

During the 1995-96 budget dispute between Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress, Walker said, “Clinton did not say the Republicans in Congress aren’t going to work with me so I’m going to do an executive order.”

“He sat down with them,” Walker said.

Kasich, who like Walker just won re-election to a second term in a Rust Belt, labor-dominated state, snapped almost matter-of-factly.

“No, he shut the government — the government got shut down first,” Kasich said.

The audience laughed. And then the two men, both of them likely to run for president in 2016, began to talk over each other as NBC’s "Meet the Press" moderator Chuck Todd stroked his red goatee in delight.

“There was tremendous animosity,” Kasich said, almost yelling, to remind the younger Walker that he, Kasich, had been there himself as a member of Congress.

“It wasn’t —” Walker tried to get out before Kasich cut him off.

“Scott, it was!” Kasich said. “I’ll tell you, when you’re sitting around and we’ve got Newt Gingrich and Bob Dole at each other over a shutdown, it wasn’t easy either.”

Then on November 9, 2014, fresh from his reelection, Walker appeared on Meet the Press in which he got slapped around again by host Chuck Todd.

Todd accurately showed that Wisconsin's job numbers and wages are lagging behind that of the national averages even though Walker tried to spin it until everyone's head was spinning.

Ironically, but not surprisingly, the Wisconsin corporate media giant Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, in their version of PolitiFact, also tried to spin things in Walker's favor even as they admitted that Todd was correct:

The quarterly time frames don’t match up precisely with Walker’s time in office because, as we noted, there is a lag of several months in reporting the figures. But when compared March 2011 to March 2014, and December 2010 to December 2013, the results were essentially the same: Wisconsin has lagged the national average on job growth, but was slightly higher on wage growth.